Forget ping-pong. When competing with China, it’s rugby league diplomacy that matters

My grandfather loved me dearly, but I let him down in an important way. I never played rugby league. Pop believed that my build would make me an ideal second-rower. To his dismay, the rough-and-tumble of league held no appeal for his bookish grandson. Still, growing up in league-obsessed Newcastle, the sport was a fundamental thread in life’s fabric. Many of my childhood afternoons were spent watching the Newcastle Knights on the hill at what was then known as Marathon Stadium. Catching a glimpse of one of the Johns brothers at the supermarket was like seeing a rock star.

For Anthony Albanese, the sport has played an even more pivotal role in his life. “I came out of the womb with a red and green eye,” the prime minister said in an ABC radio interview last year. He has described growing up imbued with three key faiths: the South Sydney Rabbitohs, the Australian Labor Party and the Catholic Church. “People barrack for football teams because it gives them a sense of belonging,” he has explained. “Rugby league provides a point of reference to our families, our community and our culture.”

Illustration by Joe Benke

Rugby league, it turns out, can also be a tool of statecraft. Next week, Albanese will officially announce that a team from Papua New Guinea will enter the NRL from 2028. The announcement has been long foreshadowed, but will still arrive with the thud of a crash tackle. And a hefty price tag. Australian taxpayers will contribute $600 million over the next 10 years to support PNG’s entry into the NRL. Privately, senior government figures are hailing the deal as the nation’s most important ever soft diplomacy initiative, a way to cement an unbreakable bond between Australia and its closest neighbour.

While it will not say so publicly, the reason the Australian government has been determined to get the deal done quickly is clear: to curtail China’s energetic efforts to expand its clout in our region. “We are in a day-to-day knife fight with China for influence in the Pacific,” one government insider says.

This is not the first time sport and geopolitics have collided. In the early 1970s, so-called “ping-pong diplomacy” was widely credited for paving the way for Richard Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing and the normalisation of relations. Visits to China and the US by leading table tennis players from the respective nations showcased a friendlier side to a bilateral relationship that had been dominated by distrust and tension. Fifty years later, the US-China relationship is again marked by hostility, and the Pacific is on the front line of the rivalry between the superpowers.

“We’ve made no secret that there is a contest,” Pacific Minister Pat Conroy, a league lover from the Hunter, told me earlier this year. “We will continue our policy of using every lever of statecraft to deepen our relationship with the region.” While Beijing can pour money into infrastructure projects, Australia has cultural advantages it cannot match. Like a shared love of rugby league.

For PNG’s Prime Minister James Marape, entering the NRL is an achievement to savour. “Rugby league is our national sport,” explains Oliver Nobetau, a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute think tank who spent most of his childhood in Port Moresby and has worked as a lawyer for the PNG government. “People live for the NRL season, they love the State of Origin. You will see kids on the street filling up plastic Coke bottles with whatever they can find and playing with that if they can’t get a ball.” In a nation with more than 800 living languages and where tribal violence remains a deadly reality, rugby league serves a crucial role in uniting PNG’s disparate communities.

I saw PNG’s obsession with league up close when I accompanied Albanese and Marape on a walk along the Kokoda Track in April. High in the mountains, we encountered barefoot kids strolling through the remote jungle wearing Manly Sea Eagles caps. During a rest stop at Hoi Village, Albanese threw around a footy with local kids whose spiral pass skills were mesmerising to watch.

Albanese and Marape discussed PNG’s NRL bid at length during the trek, in which they slept in tents and went without flushing toilets. Albanese returned home determined to get it over the line. It helped that he is close to NRL chairman Peter V’landys, who has been eager to extend rugby league’s reach beyond the east coast.

Less visible at the time were Beijing’s relentless efforts to deepen its presence in PNG. On the eve of Albanese’s Kokoda expedition, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi used a visit to Port Moresby to press Marape’s government to sign up to a bilateral policing deal. Alarmed Australian officials, a senior source later told me, “pulled out all the stops” to stop the deal from going ahead. It was shelved.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and PNG counterpart James Marape discussed PNG’s NRL bid while walking the Kokoda Track in April.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Labor insiders have noted that while media coverage of PNG’s NRL bid has been mostly positive – even on talkback radio and in News Corp tabloids – it has not necessarily been so in the reader comment sections on major news websites. There, it’s common to find complaints from voters about why the government is paying for a Pacific rugby league team when many Australians are struggling to cope with the high cost of living. A typical example, from reader Brian on an article in this masthead this week: “$600 million for a PNG rugby team for 10 years? Meanwhile, Australians can’t afford to keep the lights on and are wondering where the lower energy bills they were promised are. Time to go, Albo.”

That’s why the government wants to frame the deal as an investment, not a handout. While $600 million sounds like a lot of money, the 10-year sum is less imposing when you remember the government spends about $2 billion on Pacific aid annually. Marape believes the rugby league team will deliver a significant economic boost to his nation, helping to make it less reliant on overseas assistance. Government insiders also compare the figure with the vast amounts spent on defence equipment. How much, they ask, would it cost Australia to fortify its defences if Beijing were to set up a military base in PNG?

For months there has been swirling speculation about whether the NRL announcement will be accompanied by an explicit pledge from PNG not to allow Chinese police or military forces to be based in the country.

PNG Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko delivered a forceful denial this week, telling my colleague Chris Barrett that the NRL announcement has “nothing to do with China”. Marape made a similar point, telling reporters: “The rugby league team comes on its own, and we look forward to pushing that thing through.”

Australian government officials, by contrast, insist there is a very much a security component to the rugby league agreement. We will see next week how the two sides square that circle.

Amid the excitement of the announcement, it is worth remembering that bold initiatives carry risk as well as opportunity. If the PNG team fails to perform on the field (despite being able to lure star players with tax-free salaries) or struggles financially, it would strain rather than enhance the bilateral relationship.

In a big week for Pacific diplomacy, the government is also set to announce that it has struck a landmark economic and security deal with Nauru. Again, the clear intention is to limit China’s influence. Nauru alarmed Australian officials by switching diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing earlier this year.

Albanese has faced harsh criticism for going too soft on China in his public statements. “Meek and weak” is how former Japanese ambassador Shingo Yamagami characterises Albanese’s approach to Beijing. The prime minister counters that he has restored normal trading ties with China without making concessions on Australia’s core interests. And that he has done so while pursuing an energetic effort to ensure that Australia remains the security partner of choice in the Pacific. Next week’s PNG and Nauru announcements come after Albanese secured support in August for a Pacific-wide policing pact designed to sideline Beijing.

Indeed, the ultimate point of foreign policy is to expand Australia’s influence, not to grandstand. When it comes to competing with China in our region, kicking goals is more important than kicking up a stink.

Matthew Knott is the foreign affairs and national security correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.